Chapter 2

Chapter 2

A knock sounded at the door.

I opened it, and my mother was standing there.

Mom had a very harmless and beautiful face, but only I knew how terrifying she truly was.

Mom stared at me with a smile. “Take off your clothes.”

“Mom…” I looked at her, my eyes nearly pleading.

But I still trembled as I took off my clothes, revealing a body covered in scars of all sizes.

“Who did this? Hmm?” Mom’s smile grew even more intense.

Yet only I knew that Mom was currently very angry.

Whenever she got angry, she liked to do terrible things.

When I was five years old, a little boy at kindergarten pulled out a clump of my hair.

The next day, that boy went missing.

The news said he had accidentally fallen from a building and died.

But only I knew about the lollipop clutched tightly in the boy’s hand before he died.

It was the exact brand Mom loved to buy for me the most.

When I was in elementary school, the female teacher in my class thought I was a child from a poor family and often went out of her way to mock and ridicule me.

Even though my desk mate and I did our cleaning duties together, she always assigned the dirtiest and most exhausting tasks to me.

Watching me trip in the restroom while carrying a heavy bucket of water, the teacher laughed out loud.

I didn’t dare tell my family.

Although I hated this teacher, I didn’t want my family to do bad things even more.

But my sharp-witted mother found out about it anyway.

Not long after, I saw the news of this teacher’s death.

While she was on her way home at night, she was tortured to death by several thugs in turns.

Both her hands and feet were snapped while she was still alive.

When I saw the photos of those thugs, it felt as if the blood in my entire body had frozen solid.

Because I clearly… had seen Mom having a conversation with them, chatting and laughing, near our house.

Mom’s cold fingers brushed against my wounds.

My thoughts were pulled back, and I shuddered violently.

Mom gave a soft sigh. “Sometimes I really wonder, are you really the child I gave birth to?”

I looked at her face and said nothing.

Because I knew that I indeed was not their biological child.

I had been soft-tempered since I was a child, and I cried very easily.

I remember when I was little, the cat I kept accidentally ran out when I opened the door.

By the time we found it, it had been abused by someone unknown until it was on the verge of death.

One of the cat’s legs had been sawn off while it was alive, and even one of its eyes had been gouged out.

I sobbed until I could hardly catch my breath.

My brother couldn’t stand to watch anymore, and he said to me coldly, “You don’t want it to continue suffering, right?”

I nodded through my tear-filled eyes.

In the next second, I saw my brother snap the kitten’s neck.

The sound of the bone being broken rang out clearly.

But I remember vividly that the corners of my brother’s mouth were turned up slightly.

Later, Dad went to check the surveillance footage and saw that the cat had been tortured like this by two boys from the same residential complex.

We found the parents of those two boys.

They said dismissively, “Isn’t it just a common cat? Just tell us how much it is, and we’ll compensate you.”

“Call the police? Don’t be ridiculous. Our children are only fourteen years old. And to be honest, it’s your own fault for letting the cat out. I haven’t even mentioned how your cat scared my children yet…”

The boy poked his head out from behind his mother, laughing with arrogant malice. “Mom, that cat scratched us first!”

“Did you hear that? I haven’t even asked you for money yet, and you’ve come looking for us first. Who knows if that cat you kept had some kind of rabies virus?” The woman snorted coldly.

I was so angry that tears rolled down my cheeks. “I saw on the surveillance that they intentionally stepped on Xiaomi’s tail, and that’s why Xiaomi scratched them!”

The boy said without a hint of guilt, “Who said I did it on purpose? It was an accident! This kind of cat that scratches people should just be killed!”

I was so angry that I rushed forward to argue with him, only to be shoved to the ground by the boy’s mother.

My brother helped me up and said nonchalantly, “True. When dealing with beasts that scratch people, you should kill them…”

There was an extreme chill in his tone.

Mom and Dad didn’t speak; they just watched the woman and her child with smiles.

The woman seemed like she had never encountered parents like mine, who didn’t argue with her and whose expressions didn’t even change.

Feeling a bit guilty and unsettled, she chased us away.

A few nights later, after I woke up crying, I wanted to go to the kitchen to drink some water.

The front door opened.

I saw my brother walk in.

In the darkness, his face appeared shadowed and indistinct.

I caught a faint scent of blood.

A jarring splash of crimson was stained on my brother’s jacket.

“Brother… what did you do…” I asked, trembling.

Although a very terrifying association had already formed in my mind.

He grinned. “Your brother just went to take care of some beasts that scratch people.”

The next day, many police officers came to our complex.

It turned out that those two boys had been disemboweled alive last night, and their intestines were spilled all over the ground.

This was my family. They seemed to dote on me and love me, yet they made me…

Feel terrified.